Universe grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change…

This month has been about turning YouTube into a full time job eventually. Also TTRPG content creation into a full time job. Now before everyone tries to remind me how impossible that is, please hear me out.

I know a vast majority of gamers willing to chase this particular dragon will eventually fail. I am not so easily dissuaded, however. I have no expectations of getting rich nor do I intend to join the mighty 1% of the population through roleplaying game content. Honestly, AdSense money and enough to cover my DriveThruRPG.com orders is plenty.

I would like to get a new computer and some stuff for my studio to better enable me to do YouTube videos that look amazing. The Universe will provide through a chain of incidence when the time is right. I have faith. Law of Attraction and the Universe are my friends. Some of you probably think that sounds crazy until you see it unfold in front of you. I have done it. It can be done.

Disclaimer: This is my blog. This is how I see things and how I feel. There is little factual information being presented. If you have issue with anything being presented, please contact me privately on X (Twitter,) Instagram, BlueSky, or by email. Otherwise, there are lots of platforms out there for you to vent your feelings and opinions, too.

I can only change myself.

In a perfect world that we can imagine, people would not make six and a half hour long YouTube livestreams where the host and his audience roast the crap out of female content creators in the TTRPG space. My reaction to their “advice” and reactionary video rhetoric was, “Those dirty rotten mother 🦆🦆🦆ers!”

That’s a very triggered response and it’s not very nice. It does sum up what went through my head in the moment, and I think it’s healthy to acknowledge it. Part of being positive and high vibe is acknowledging those negative feelings and looking upon them with curiosity instead of judgement. We also have to remember there are such things as spiritual bypassing and toxic positivity, too. Negative thoughts don’t make someone a bad person. Living in that low vibrational state and acting on those negative thoughts can have negative effect on one’s own life.

I somehow convinced myself to sit through the part of the video I was most concerned with and skipped all the other trash. I think it’s fair to say this person’s advice was far from being what he claimed. Roasting people because of their gender, their appearance, their background equipment, and their TTRPG opinions is NOT advice. In fact, I think it’s rude as Hell and shouldn’t be allowed on YouTube. But, not my platform, not my Terms of Service. (Although harassing, bullying, and making veiled threats pretty much are a violation of said ToS.)

Unfortunately the only person I have the power to change is myself. Humans are constantly growing, learning and hopefully evolving. I can only try to inform others and hope that maybe they see my point through the lens of their own discernment and make a change within themselves. That’s what we do on blogs and on YouTube. (Aside from informative or entertaining bits about mallards, geese kaiju, and Wizards of the Coast shenanigans.)

As angry as I am at Whatshisname and his intellectual clique of arseholes, all I can do is put out content promoting people I like and care about. All I can do is put out the advice from my experience and say, “Hey, let’s try to do this instead of being nasty to our fellow content creators.”

Knigobi is my hero.

She champions her love of Dungeons & Dragons 5E and sets a very solid example to new players as well as Dungeon Masters with every video. Please check out her channel here. She’s a great example of content creation for YouTube done right.

Knigobi’s titles and thumbnails are spot on. Her hooks reel the audience in and land them all the way into the video. She’s not spammy or pushing sponsors down our throats. Her social media experience shows in cultivating her community. Honestly I’m not sure why her subscriber count isn’t over 10K yet. She’s doing all the things the YouTube gurus say you should do with your channel to be successful.

I sincerely want to see her continue to grow on YouTube. Watching her journey and seeing D&D through her vision of it has been inspiring to me. I would love for any game I ever run to be as awesome as her homebrew D&D game. If I lived anywhere near her I’d be begging her to let me play in her in-person game. They sound like an amazing group of people.

This all relates back to Freedom Day for me because…

I am far from suitable to hold down a “regular job.” Even if someone wanted to hire a guy like me in this culture and this economy, I couldn’t do it. I still have PTSD from my last job. Physically I’m still a mess and mentally/emotionally I can’t handle personal criticism well. No employer is going to want that.

My fixed income source is very touchy about any money I make outside of it. YouTube and digital content creation are perfect because it gives me a little side hustle cash to work with, but not so much as to land me on their radar. If somehow I blew up huge overnight and could replace the fixed income with a bit to spare? That would be amazeballs prosperity, but I think it’s a long ways off.

On the upside, being unemployed for going on four years has been incredibly pleasant for the most part. My overall stress has gone way down. The tightness in my chest has gone away most of the time. (I still have children.) I’m not as cranky at home as I once was.

I only get triggered by dumb stuff on YouTube about once a month. (Nervous chuckle.) It seems like as a hobby/culture in general we seem to have something come up at least once per month. WotC/D&D, the anti-woke crowd, or some silly DungeonTuber drama rears its head and gives us something to talk about until the next disaster hits. I often refer to it as being, “on the Drama Llama to Trauma Town.” I think that’s a future video title.

Back to gaming soon.

I think this month’s controversy with the six and a half hour livestream is finally starting to quiet down. Knigobi has said it. I’ll say it, too. I just want to talk about gaming. I want to focus that love and light on the hobby I enjoy as well as the people I care about.

Right now I have about a week’s worth of YouTube journey and advice videos coming out. Then we’re back to Dragonbane and monsters on the channel. Eventually I want to get an ICONS related set of videos out. I might also put some reviews on there. I have a ton of Free League games and other things to talk about. If you’ve sent me a game I will get to you eventually. Sorry for the delay.

Red Green used to say, “Keep your stick on the ice. We’re all in this together.”

Thank you for being here with me today. I appreciate you. Keep it real, but please strive for positivity, too. Please embrace the things that bring you the most joy in your life.